I spend most of my time on Easy Digital Downloads since that was my initial focus when I was hired back in 2014. I do plan to be more involved with the other projects in the future.

Anyway, before I was hired, I spent most of my time freelancing web development and working on my personal projects, Build WP Yourself and Volatyl Themes. You could consider freelancing my day job and the aforementioned projects my hobby. I call them hobbies based solely on the amount of revenue they generated. Had they been the primary breadwinners, I’d probably change my tone.

Welp, I definitely didn’t expect to arrive at this point. Motivation, inspiration, all of it… long gone when it comes to web work.

“Long gone” is probably a bit extreme. There’s a chance my feelings could be reversed in the right situation. But right now, shit… I’d rather do just about anything else than sit at my computer all day and jam keys.

I’m not sure if it’s the keys themselves or the reason behind the jamming. But I do know that it doesn’t excite me anymore. I’m pretty sure I know why, too.

For the most part, I’m annoyed by interaction with other people. It’s not always bad. It’s not always anyone’s fault either. I just get exhausted easily. That’s probably a better way to describe it… exhaustion.

I pay attention to every word. If we’re interacting in person, I pay attention to body language. I make adjustments to my choice of words, my body language, and my perception of the other person’s perception of me.

I try to understand what the other person wants out of the conversation. As long as I don’t have to sacrifice anything I feel is important, I give it to them. I refuse to bother people. I refuse to manipulate people. I’ll walk away from the conversation before I allow myself to be a burden to someone else.

No big deal… I’m just tired of using it the way I have been. Likewise, I don’t care to take some kind of self-improvement approach to change the way I use it. Unfollows, mutes, and all of that jazz is a waste of my time.

My personal Twitter account goes where Facebook went almost two years ago… in the history books.

I still have @volatylwp and @buildwpyourself. They’re focused, obviously. It’s not hard to find me, especially if you’re here already.

Also, I like Skype. sdavis2702

Talk soon.

Edit – April 2017

No more social media period. No, nothing happened. Yes, I am fine. I’ve just grown out of the social media era. I honestly feel like everyone else will too. I’m just not the type to ignore my feelings on it and wait for the masses to shift.

Reach out to me if you want to talk to me. You know… like the old days.

It’s not random… at all. In fact, this move is almost seven years in the making. I feel like documenting the story, so here we go.

Let’s go back to 2009. I was at work in FOB Hammer, Iraq. It was a pretty normal day in what would be my third and final tour to Iraq. My 1st Sergeant (1SG) had just returned from the US after three weeks of leave (vacation). Having him back, like any authority figure who has to disappear for a while, was bittersweet.

While he was away, I had additional responsibilities. As a sergeant, taking care of Soldiers and making decisions in my unit were already part of my daily routine. But while he was away, I had to communicate with a few “big wigs” from other organizations. Nothing I hadn’t done before.

Every time I say I am “learning JavaScript,” it feels funny because of all the experience I have with the language. I also feel uneasy using those words because I’m pretty sure people think I already know it.

The truth is I can only edit JS when I need to. I very rarely write it from scratch.

This is nothing new for most developers. Those of us who are self-taught were most likely to have time periods like this with each language that we now write fluently. It’s just part of the natural progression when you understand coding philosophies that stretch from one language to another but vary in syntax.

A couple of months ago, I decided to create an account with Treehouse. I’m very pleased so far… mainly because walking through the JS courses have opened my eyes to my own issues that keep me from progressing like I should.

If you ask me right now if I write JS, I’ll probably tell you I don’t. But every time I sit down to study JS, it seems that I don’t learn anything new. What’s going on there?

I’ll tell you… it’s called psyching myself out. I convince myself that I don’t know JS because I never write it from scratch. No more of that mess.

I’m going to finish this course with Treehouse because it’s cool and I like the lessons. But it’s time to officially add JS to the list of other languages that don’t scare me away every time I have to write them.

Long time no speak, people. What can I say? I’ve been busy trying to stay busy. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up for discussion.

The last real article I wrote on here was back in July of 2014. I wrote it on my 50th day at Easy Digital Downloads. A lot has happened since then. I’m more than committed to EDD now. It could have been a temporary thing back when I wrote that article. I’m happy with how things turned out.

There has been one negative side effect to starting work with EDD back in June of 2014, but I have no one to blame but myself. Rather than describe how it has all worked out, let me just give it to you with stats from the last 8 months.

I started working for Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) on June 10, 2014 after a lightning fast Twitter DM conversation with Pippin. Completely unexpected, he asked me if I would be willing to join the support crew at EDD and he’d understand if I wasn’t willing to. “Shit, man… hell yea I’m willing to!” I said something like that.

I’ve been a fan of EDD since I started using it to sell Volatyl back in March of 2013. I’m not sure if it was the software itself, the lucrative business model, or its extensibility. All I know is EDD kind of took over my development world to the point where I started integrating my own software with it.

Now here we are, 50 days into working with the EDD crew and I want to talk about it… mainly because I haven’t written a thing for myself since the day I started. So let’s get to it.